Rip and shrink copy-protected DVDs

When you buy a DVD movie at the shop you would like the opportunity to back it up. However, due to the built-in copy protection, this might not be a simple task if you do not have Ubuntu with k9copy and K3b installed.

k9copy is able to break the copy protection and make a DVD image which you can burn to DVD using the burning application K3b (or other DVD burning software). Because ordinary DVDs are dual-layer (8.9 GB), the size of their content exceeds the capacity of cheap, single-layer recordable DVDs (4.4 GB). Luckily, k9copy can also shrink the DVD image to fit on a single-layer DVD. The quality loss is most of the time negligible but if you worry about this, the software gives you an option to only copy parts of the DVD content, e.g., only the movie itself without extra material.

Naturally, if you have those expensive burnable dual-layer DVDs, you can copy the entire DVD without any loss of quality.

To install, do

sudo apt-get install k9copy k3b 

or to get all the recommended packages, do

sudo apt-get install k9copy k3b k3b-i18n libk3b3-extracodecs movixmaker-2 normalize-audio libgtk2-gladexml-perl flac 

Windows users:
Download DVDDecrypter, DVDShrink, and Imgburn (see below). DVDDecrypter removes the copy protection and let you copy the DVD to your hard drive. You may then use DVDShrink to shrink the DVD copy to fit on a single-layer DVD. Apparently it is possible to use DVDShrink for the entire operation (both copy and shrink) but in my experience you should use DVDDecrypter for the copying, and DVDShrink for the shrinking. The shrinked DVD folder or image file can be burnt to a burnable DVD using DVDDecrypter or ImgBurn.

Downloads:
DVDDecrypter 3.5.4.0
DVDShrink 3.2
ImgBurn 2.4.2.0

You can find more video-related applications, troubleshooting, and guides at Doom9. They claim that DVDDecrypter may have trouble ripping new DVDs with structural protection. If you experience problems, you may try DVDFab HD Decrypter 5.0.9.0, however, I have no experience with this program. You might also consider switching to Ubuntu or other Linux distributions!

Enjoy ripping!

How to compact a VirtualBox virtual disk image (VDI)

After having used VirtualBox for a while, the actual size of your virtual disk image (VDI) may have grown to become very close to the virtual size. That is, even if your guest machine system reports that it only uses a small amount of disk space, its VDI image filesize is considerably larger. In general, the following three steps will compact your VDI file:

1. Defragment hard drive (in guest system)
   
2. Write zeros to hard drive blocks of free space (in guest system)
   
3. Compact the VDI virtual disk image (in host system)
   

After this process, your VDI file size should be approximately equal to what the guest system reports being in use.

Consider the following example: I run Ubuntu 8.04 as the host system and have Windows XP installed as a guest machine. The corresponding VDI file, winxp.vdi, has a virtual size of 20 GB and an actual size of ~18 GB. However, logging in to the virtual Windows XP system, it tells me that only 3 GB of disk space is in use, while 17 GB is free. How can I shrink, or compact, the VDI file to only use about 3 GB as needed?

1. Windows XP (guest): Run Start -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Defragmenter
   
2. Windows XP (guest): Download and run nullfile-1.02.exe, or run

   sdelete -c

   
   
3. Ubuntu 8.04 (host): Run

   VBoxManage modifyvdi winxp.vdi compact

   
   

Afterwards, the actual size of winxp.vdi is only ~3GB, that is, about 15 GB of free space has become available to Ubuntu.